Object-oriented APIs may be used in a web services environment. For example, a web services server may expose an API to enable a client computing device to obtain data from the web services server through the API. In certain scenarios, the object-oriented API may have certain drawbacks. For instance, the object-oriented API may be difficult for a programmer to program against when creating a dashboard-type user interface (UI). In a dashboard-type UI, it may be desirable to show summaries of data across several class types. However, in order to return these summaries, the summaries have to be pre-defined as classes in the object model. Otherwise, the summaries would not be able to be returned. Developers may bypass the API layer in favor of directly accessing the database, which may result in a loss of database security and/or database integrity. Additionally or alternatively, the server hosting the database may need to support multiple APIs in order to support returning the desired summaries of data, which may mean that developers would need to learn and be able to program against multiple, different APIs to obtain the desired data.
In a similar manner, developers may desire to show a composite view across a number of different objects. However, in order to return the composite view, the developer may need to use multiple API calls to obtain the necessary information to construct the desired composite view. It may be desirable to provide systems and methods to improve the efficiency and ease with which data may be returned using an object-oriented API.